Book recommendation request

Hi everyone, I'm a beginner with a current score of just under 1200.  I'm after a good book that will teach me the basics and help to boost my score.  Does anyone have any good recommendations? Thank you.

I've gone through the same improvement business as a recent beginner and tried out a lot of books. The choice depends how much effort/time you want to dedicate and if you want a quick boost or want to lay the foundations for the long term. Assuming the latter, the following are gold:

Polgar Chess: 5334 Problems

Pandolfini's Endgame Workshop (I love this book, it explains things so much better than its rivals). If you want to be good many players I respect recommend serious endgame focus early on, it teaches you a lot of skills aside from the specific endgames you study.

Chernev Logical Chess Move By Move

If you're more after quick results, a good all-round introductory text is Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan, and the more time you then spend on tactics after that the better. You could always move onto the above books after - don't assume you know the fundamentals until they're second nature. If you do you'll plateau later on. For a pure tactics book if you don't want to commit to the big Laszlo Polgar book above Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar is my favourite. Do those questions until the tactical motifs are second nature. Don't succumb to web based tactics training with 50,000 problems or whatever, it's more efficient to see the same problems again and master them. I haven't nearly completed all the books I've mentioned above, these "basics" take you to a good level if you take the trouble to learn them rather than skipping ahead...

Hope that helps.

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, as you mention I want to lay some foundations for the long term.  I think I'll have a look at a couple of them and certainly go for Polgar Chess.  Thanks again.

You're welcome. As you're interested in long term improvement, I'd point out online chess (correspondence/turn based) is really useful for developing your thinking - don't play masses of games at once but take some time with each, then sit down and look through your moves and see what you could have done better. After you could post the games in the forum for people to critique or run it through a chess engine to analyse and find tactics you'll have missed etc. Doing that sets up a feedback loop that will improve your play and hopefully stop you making the same mistakes repeatedly. The process takes time but you'll get there so don't get dispirited. Blitz games are fun but kind of hinder your development if you play them too much - you can reinforce snap decision making and sloppy thinking. Medium length games, like 30-45 minutes are a good compromise.

For general learning advice have a look at Dan Heisman's novice nook columns at chesscafe.com, the article called Secrets of Real Chess is often recommended.

Anyway I'll leave it there. All the best.

Thanks again for your time and help.  All the best.

This is good advice. I'd just like to emphasize a point: do not play too many correspondence games. You'll make mistakes you wouldn't normally make, for example, in tournament games. (That comes from experience). I'd say 10 or less is a good number of games.

Also, another thing you can use that will improve your play is a tactics trainer; the one on this site, or on ChessTempo, for example.

Thank you for the advice, I've been using the tactics trainer on this site and I'm currently playing 8 correspondence games.  I really appreciate your thoughts.  All the best.